Greeley ultrarunner prefers 50-mile runs that are surrounded by nature

Kelli Picon of Greeley runs through the trails at Lory State Park near Fort Collins. Picon prefers trails over roads for long training runs, which is a big reason she switched to ultrarunning. The first-grade teacher calls Lory her playground.

Kelli Picon of Greeley runs in the 2009 Blue Sky Marathon near Fort Collins. Picon won the race, but she prefers ultrarunning now because the goal is just to finish, not to run a great time. Picon has completed four 50-mile races.

Where to start

Interested in ultrarunning? These three events may be a good place for your first race.

» Blue Sky Marathon — This race near Fort Collins isn’t an ultra, but the terrain makes it feel like one. www.blueskymarathon.com

» The Bear Chase Trail Race — The race is closer and gentler than many other ultraraces, and yet you’ll find distances up to 50 miles. www.bearchaserace.com

» Pikes Peak Ascent — This race doesn’t go much over a half-marathon, but it’s on dirt, and you’ll get a good idea of what it’s like to climb thousands of feet at a high elevation. There is a marathon, as well. www.pikespeakmarathon.org

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There frequently comes a time when Kelli Picon wonders why she runs as far as she does.

Those doubts come during the races, of course, but Picon of Greeley expects that. Doubts are one of the small, insane pleasures of ultrarunning, along with puking, being out in the middle of the night or tumbling over rocky trails that gash her sun-beaten skin.

Sometimes she targets a goal time, like she did in her road running days, when she was a competitive marathoner who only wanted to qualify for Boston and fretted about her pace like a miser frets about his gold. But by mile 40, in all four of the 50-milers she completed, that target time dissolved into a new, more important goal. That goal was to not die.

But she also wonders why she runs so far during her training runs, and those doubts come more than she wishes or understands.

Maybe it’s during a 25-mile run, her second of the weekend; or maybe it’s when she’s up again before the sun, even though sleeping in is one of her favorite things to do; or maybe it’s when she’s promised her kids she will run with them in a race after she’s run all night and she’s yelling at them to pace themselves because that 1 mile feels like her bones are cracking beneath her.

Those doubts don’t last long. They never do. And that’s because of what happened to her before her first ultramarathon.

Picon’s husband at the time, CJ of Greeley, started training for the Leadville 100 with a few friends, and Picon thought they were idiots. She was a marathoner by then, though, and she loved everything about those races, especially the challenge of them, and so her curiosity got the best of her. She hated the trails at first. They slowed her down, and her road racing-watching personality didn’t like that.

Yet the training struck a nerve. She used to run 20 miles at a time while training for a marathon, and that would wipe her out for the weekend. But she was running those back-to-back. Or she was hiring a babysitter to sleep with their young kids and driving up to Rocky Mountain National Park with CJ and the group and running all night and then coming home and maybe grabbing a nap in the afternoon but more often then not doing something with her children. Or she was enjoying the flowers along the trail (when she could see them) and the dirt on her shoes and deer that bounded ahead of her.

The training seemed unbelievable, but it wasn’t. It was all-consuming. It was fun. It was all she talked about with CJ and her training partners. That’s why it was so devastating when she fell during one of those night runs and cracked her pelvis. She was almost done with the training, but not only could she not do the race, she couldn’t run at all for six months.

“There were so many days when I would wake up and I didn’t want to go for a run,” Picon said. “(After my injury) I would wake up, and all I wanted to do was go for a run. I was mad I couldn’t run, and yet I had no outlet for that because I couldn’t run.”

Running those miles hurt. But not running hurt a lot worse.

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Picon began running as a freshman at the University of Northern Colorado because she felt suffocated in the dorms and wanted a little alone time. She ran a loop and added to it when she could. After a few months, she measured how far she could run and it was 4 miles. “OMG,” thought the college student. The Bolder Boulder once seemed impossible, but those 6 miles were doable now. She completed it that year.

Then again, maybe she shouldn’t have been too surprised. Her father, Steve Puter, a gym teacher, was always active (he’s in his 60s but just the other day he rode 80 miles on his bicycle). Her family seemed to promote the kind of suffering ultrarunners grow to love. Every New Year’s Day, for 20 years now, her family peels the ice off a pool they fill the night before and submerge themselves in it. They even have a name for it: The Puter Plunge. Yes, Picon is an official member.

Picon’s sister talked her into doing a half marathon when she was 27, and she thought if she would do the half, she might as well do the full. She’s now 37, and she’s done 14 marathons and the four 50-milers.

She won one, the 2009 Blue Sky Marathon near Fort Collins, a marathon over the rugged Blue Sky trail near Horsetooth Reservoir. The prize for that, a rock, sits on her bedroom dresser. She got hooked from her first, she said, because there was a time during the race when she didn’t think she could go on. And then she did it.

“There was this euphoria,” Picon said. “You can always go farther than you think you can go.”

The euphoria after a race is the same, maybe even more so, but there are differences between ultrarunning and more conventional road running, and those differences are why Picon craves the trail over asphalt through cities. Ultras are more casual. Sometimes the start is a line someone’s drawn in the dirt. The runners support each other and aren’t there to necessarily beat each other, although that is a goal for some.

They’re there to share in the beauty of it all, Picon said. She remembers one ultrarace when a runner who had obviously finished hours before her was along the trail, running to encourage the others to finish. She later recognized him as the winner. That, she said, probably wouldn’t happen in a big city marathon because of security issues alone.

Road runners ARE supportive, Picon said, and she points to where she teaches, Christa McAuliffe Elementary in Greeley, as an example (she is in her fourth year and teaches first grade). Dan Goding, a third-grade teacher, is fast enough to place high in his age bracket at the Chicago Marathon. Tim Beckman, the music teacher, is a marathoner who qualified for Boston, and Mike Shea, the art teacher, just qualified himself at a marathon in Utah. Margaret Grant, a second-grade teacher, recently ran a half marathon. It’s fun to hear about those races, she said, and talk about running.

“But I think the conditioning is a step above of what I do,” Beckman said of what Picon does. “On a road you can talk and look around, but you have to concentrate on trails, and I think trail running is hard on my body. She never seems to have any trouble with that, and she’s not afraid of taking a fall or getting a little beat up. She’s pretty tough.”

Picon may even like the scrapes a little bit. She recently posted a couple gashes from a trail race in Steamboat on Facebook. She probably should have been looking at the trail a little more, she said in her post, and the sunset a little less.

Then again, that may defeat the purpose. Time doesn’t matter, not when she’s on the trail, and not when she’s running, and she knows that now.

Ultrarunning doesn’t define her. She learned that the hard way when the Leadville 100 didn’t work out. She’s a teacher and a mother. She carries a touch of guilt about those hours away from them, even now, though her kids, Logan, 14, and Eden, 12, are probably still asleep these days when she gets back, and Eden will tell her to stop whining during one of her long training runs when Picon calls to check in.

But ultrarunning is a big part of her. She calls places like Lory State Park her playground, as if she’s one of her students. And when she’s out to play, sometimes she will take her iPhone along to take a picture of what she sees, so she can have them with her at all times. It’s always good to stop for a moment, take a look around, and remember why she runs as far as she does.